Big Data for Speech and Language Processing

Amongst all creatures the human species stands unique in Darwin's natural selection process. It is no exaggeration that speech and language helped to differentiate human intelligence from animal intelligence in the evolution process. The impact of big data and cloud to speech and language evolution is foundational to realize the society's AI vision. This talk will review how Microsoft achieved human parity on both conversational speech recognition and news machine translation research tasks and highlight significant challenges remaining to make speech and language production services mainstream in our AI journey.